Who: Twisted What: Reveal. Where: Hotel steps. When: After the sun comes up. Warnings/Rating: Swearing.
He wasn't entirely sure how it happened. One minute, he was sitting and talking with the sweet girl he'd wandered across injured on the roof. The next, the sun was coming up, and she'd gone. So too were the effects of the night fading, a dark robe melting into a dark suit, the bag over his head dissipating into thin air. Horrible wounds closed, and drips of pus and black, infected blood dried up, cleaned up, and disappeared. A terrible visage with clear green eyes righted itself. His back straightened, his legs unbowed, and his fingers reappeared from within gloves, whole, his crooked, weak fingers gone sure again.
The first thing he did was have a cigarette.
He sat down on the steps of the hotel, lit up, and watched people stumble blearily out. Everybody was in recovery mode, seemed like. He didn't fucking blame them.
His journal was in his pocket, and he pulled it out, scanning the message on the first page before tucking it away again. No, that was fine. A hotel that forced him to come to a fucked up mandatory party where he got to be exactly the kind of mess he really was. No, seriously, that was how he'd wanted to spend his fucking night. Fuck this place.
In the end, though, it hadn't been all bad. Unnerving, yeah, and painful, absolutely, but the girl had been a sweetheart, although he wished he hadn't been so fucking honest with her. In a weird way, he sort of missed that honesty, too. Through the night he'd been crippled, but he'd felt things. Everything hadn't reached him through a layer of disaffected boredom and bitterness. He'd been as raw on the outside as he would be on the inside if he didn't smother it in total over stimuli and a lot of ignoring the shit he didn't want to think about. He'd been fucking nice, for god's sake. He hadn't been nice in years.
It hadn't exactly been a vacation, going back to all that, the things he 'really was'. At its worst, it still hadn't told him anything he didn't already know. Blake was made up of a whole lot of wounds that he'd left untouched for a long, long time, and that damage had multiplied, calcified, and grown cancerous around his heart.